Quotes related to Vegetarianism

"Humans are not the only species on Earth… we just act like it!"
UNKNOWN

“The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”
BENTHAM, JEREMY, author of An Introduction to the Principles of Morals & Legislation ,
1789

“Whenever people say "We mustn’t be sentimental," you can take it they are about to do
something cruel. And if they add "We must be realistic," they mean they are going to make
money out of it.”
BROPHY, BRIGID, author of Unlived Life: A Manifesto Against Factory Farming

“Isn't man an amazing animal? He kills wildlife- birds, kangaroos, deer, all kinds of cats,
coyotes, beavers, groundhogs, mice, foxes, and dingoes- by the million in order to protect his
domestic animals and their feed. Then he kills domestic animals by the billions and eats
them. This in turn kills man by the million, because eating all those animals leads to
degenerative- and fatal- health conditions like heart disease, kidney disease, and cancer. So
then man tortures and kills millions more animals to look for cures for these diseases.
Elsewhere, millions of other human beings are being killed by hunger and malnutrition because
food they could eat is being used to fatten domestic animals. Meanwhile, some people are
dying of sad laughter at the absurdity of man, who kill so easily and so violently, and yet
once a year sends out cards praying for "Peace on Earth."
COATS, C. DAVID, author of Old MacDonald's Factory Farm

"Men of wisdom do not eat meat."
CONFUCIUS

"Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on earth as much
as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”
EINSTEIN, ALBERT

“Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop
harming all other living beings, we are still savages.”
EDISON, THOMAS

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the
world.”
FRANK, ANNE

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are
treated.”
“Peace only prevails among humans when their meals are not prepared with animals' lives.”
GANDHI, MAHATMA, 1869-1948

“Current safety testing procedures are not only out-of-date and extremely cruel, but they are
also inadequate to protect consumers from unsafe products.”
IFFY, LESLIE, MD

“Flesh foods are not the best nourishment for human beings and were not the food of our
primitive ancestors. There is nothing necessary or desirable for human nutrition to be found
in meats or flesh foods which is not found in and derived from plant foods.”
KELLOG, JH, DR, 1852-1943
“If it has eyes or runs away, don't eat it.”
KELLOGG, WILL KEITH, Founder of Kellogg Cereal

“The human body has no more need for cows’ milk than it does for dogs’ milk, horses’ milk, or
giraffes’ milk.”
KLAPER, MICHAEL, MD

“When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man, we call him ‘vandal.’ When he wantonly
destroys one of the works of God, we call him ‘sportsman’”
KRUTCH, JOSEPH WOOD, 1893-1970

“Going Vegan is the best thing most people can do for the environment, their health, and, of
course, the animals.”
LYMAN, HOWARD, ex-forth generation cattle rancher and feedlot operator

“If slaughterhouses had glass walls, we would all be vegetarians.”
MCCARTNEY, L.

“Eat your veggies, not your friends.”
MCCARTNEY, LINDA

“Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child, as it is to the
caterpillar.”
MILLER, BRADLEY

“Slaughterhouses should be in restaurants and grocery stores. They should have a glass wall so
people must see the animals and choose. Look into the animal’s eyes and say, 'OK, slit his
throat.'”
NEWKIRK, INGRID, co-founder of PeTA

“I will not eat anything that walks, runs, skips, hops or crawls. God knows that I've crawled
on occasion, and I'm glad that no one ate me.”
POULOS, ALEX

“For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed
of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.”
PYTHAGORAS

“To one whose mind is free, there is something even more intolerable in the suffering of
animals than in the sufferings of humans. For with the latter, it is at least admitted that
suffering is evil and that the person who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals
are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any person were to refer to
it, they would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime. That alone is the
justification of all that humans may suffer. It cries vengeance upon all the human race. If
God exists and tolerates it, it cries vengeance upon God.”
ROLLAND, ROMAIN, Nobel Laureate Jean Christophe

“While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we ever expect ideal
conditions on earth.”
SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD

“I flatly declare that a man fed on whiskey and dead bodies cannot do the finest work of which
he is capable.”
SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD

“An underfed man is not a man who gets no meat, or gets nothing but meat. He is one who does
not get enough to eat, no matter what he eats. The person who is ignorant enough to believe
that his nourishment depends on meat is in a horrible dilemma.”
SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD

“It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have
existed only to endure unmitigated misery.”
SHELLY, PERCY BYSSHE

“People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for
continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from
murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.”
SINGER, ISAAC BASHEVIS, Nobel Laureate

“I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual
improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating
each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.”
THOREAU, HENRY DAVID

“For every ten people clipping at the branches of evil, you are lucky to find one hacking at
the roots.”
THOREAU, HENRY DAVID

“I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I
look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.”
VINCI, LEONARDO DA

“If experiments on animals were abandoned on grounds of compassion, mankind would have made a
fundamental advance.”
WAGNER, RICHARD

“The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any
more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.”
WALKER, ALICE, author of The Color Purple AND The Dreaded Comparison:
Human & Animal Slavery

“There can be no justification for causing suffering to animals simply to serve mans' pleasure
or simply to enhance mans’ lifestyle.”
- The Dean of York

Excelent Quotes

“There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental
faculties... The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and
misery.”
DARWIN, CHARLES

“I am in favor of all animal rights, as well as human rights. That is the way of whole-hearted
human beings.”
LINCOLN, ABRAHAM

“Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude toward those who
are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect, human kind has suffered a fundamental debacle,
a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.”
KUNDERA, MILAN, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“But for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh, we deprive a soul of the sun and light and
of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy.”
PLUTARCH

"How many animals in a million have even relative freedom in any moment of their lives? No
choice is ever permitted them; and all heir most natural instincts are denied or made subject
to authority."
RAMEE, LOUISE DE LA, animal rights activist and novelist, 1892
“Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it
explodes into a giant oak. Bury a sheep and nothing happens but decay.”
SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD

“One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it
furnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he religiously devotes a part
of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking
all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones,
jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.”
THOREAU, HENRY DAVID

“What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or
endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit for their
cruelty.”
TOLSTOY, LEO

Good Quotes

“In every respect, vegans appear to enjoy equal or better health in comparison to both
vegetarians and non-vegetarians.”
CAMPBELL, T. COLIN, PhD Professor of Nutrition, Cornell University

“You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit. If it eats the rabbit and plays with the
apple, I'll buy you a new car.”
DIAMOND, HARVEY

“It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living, by its purely physical effect on the
human temperament, would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.”
EINSTEIN, ALBERT

“You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful
distance of miles, there is complicity.”
EMERSON, RALPH WALDO

“Many very intelligent men have, at different times in their lives, abstained wholly from
flesh, and this, too, with very considerable advantage to their health. All these facts,
taken collectively, point to a period in the progress of civilization when men will cease to
slay their fellow-mortals in the animal world for food.”
FORSTER, T, Moral Reflections on the Animal Kingdom (1839)

“My refusing to eat flesh occasioned an inconvenience, and I was frequently chided for my
singularity, but with this lighter repast I made the greater progress, from greater clearness
of head and quicker comprehension.”
FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN, 1706-1790

“It ill becomes us to invoke in our daily prayers the blessings of God, the compassionate, if
we in turn will not practice elementary compassion toward our fellow creatures.”
GANDHI, MAHATMA, 1869-1948

“Do but examine your own compassionate heart, and tell me do you not think it a breach of
natural justice to want only and without necessity to torment, much more to take away the life
of any creature?”
HILDROP, JOHN, 18th century ARA

“If one offers me with love and devotion a leaf, flower, fruit or water, I will accept it.”
Bhagavad Gita, As It Is, 9:26
KRISHNA

“Can there be one justice for man, and another for brutes? Or is feeling in them a different
thing to what it is in ourselves? Is not a beast produced by the same rule, in the same order
of generation with ourselves? Is not his body nourished by the same food, hurt by the same
injuries? ... Is this spark, or soul, to perish because it chanced to belong to a beast? Tell
me, learned philosophers, how that may possibly happen.”
LAWRENCE, JOHN, 18th century animal rights activist

“When it comes to having a central nervous system, and the ability to feel pain, hunger, and
thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.”
NEWKIRK, INGRID co-founder of PeTA

“It is a pleasure to foster the idea of a golden age regained, when the thought of the butcher
shall not mingle with our flocks and herds. May the benevolent system spread to every corner
of the globe! May we learn to recognize and to respect, in other animals, the feelings which
vibrate in *ourselves!*”
NICHOLSON, GEORGE, 18th century ARA and printer

“See that no brute of any kind, whether entrusted to thy care, or roaming in thy way, suffer
through thy neglect and abuse. Let no views of profit, no compliance with custom, and no fear
of the ridicule of the world, ever tempt thee to the least act of cruelty or injustice to any
creature whatsoever. But let this be your invariable rule, everywhere, and at all times, to
*do unto others as, in their condition, you would be done unto*.”
PRIMATT, HUMPHRY, 18th century ARA

“With increased knowledge of the behavior and cognitive abilities of the chicken, has come the
realization that the chicken is not an inferior species to be treated merely as a food
source.”
ROGERS, LESLEY J, DR, The Development of Brain and Behavior in the Chicken, 1995

“A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.”
SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD

“The odd thing about being a vegetarian is, not that the things that happen to other people
don't happen to me-they all do-but that they happen differently: pain is different, pleasure
different, fever different, cold different, even love different.”
SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD

“This [video footage from the movie Babe] is the way Americans want to think of pigs.
Real-life "Babes" see no sun in their limited lives, with no hay to lie on, no mud to roll in.
The sows live in tiny cages, so narrow they can’t even turn around. They live over metal
grates, and their waste is pushed through slats beneath them and flushed into huge pits.”
SAFER, MORLEY, Pork Power, 60 Minutes, 9/19/97

"Every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best
condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of
any kind."
THOREAU, HENRY DAVID

(as God spoke to Adam & Eve) "And behold, I have given you every herb-bearing seed, which is
upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree-yielding seed;
to you it shall be for meat."
GENESIS, 1:29
BIBLE

"To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me," saith the Lord. "I am full of
the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of
bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats... ...and when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide
mine eyes from you; yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of
blood. Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes."
ISAIAH 1:11, 1:15-16
BIBLE

“Animals experience many of the same emotions as humans. When confronted with a bellowing cow,
meat industry consultant and Professor of Animal Sciences, Dr. Temple Grandin noted, "That’s
one sad, unhappy, upset cow. She wants her baby. Bellowing for it, hunting for it. It’s like
grieving, mourning - not much written about it. People don’t like to allow them thoughts or
feelings."”
-An Anthropologist on Mars, 1995

“An animal should have at least sufficient freedom of movement to be able, without difficulty,
to turn around, groom itself, up, lie down, and stretch its limbs.”
- British Government Report (1965)